6
You Take the Money; I’ll Take Control
It was just months after Au Bon Pain’s IPO that I got my first taste of what being a public company CEO really meant. I was in the middle of a company event at Jillian’s, a Boston billiards parlor, when I got a call from our Morgan Stanley analyst. He sounded angry.
“Why are your numbers off?” he demanded. We were going through a bit of a rough patch and not living up to the starry-eyed forecasts of our pre-IPO road show.
That was when it fully dawned on me that I worked for this guy now—and for all the fund managers and investors in those funds who had piled their plates high with the millions of shares we’d offered in our public debut. In going public, we’d effectively taken on thousands of new partners, ...
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